


Went for the Moon Landing

by eirtae



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Canon Divergence, M/M, Post-Thor, Pre-Relationship, Pre-Thor: The Dark World, Rarepair, literal bodice ripping
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-16
Updated: 2020-05-29
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:29:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,731
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24222829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eirtae/pseuds/eirtae
Summary: “Sometimes people call me Star-Lord,” added Peter. He was 98.7% sure that Loki was absolutely full of shit, but on the off chance that hewasn’t, managing to get the buy-in of a god-king might make the name properly catch on.“Do they?” asked Loki with gentle disbelief.“It’s a thing,” confirmed Peter as he gathered the last of the noodles into the corner of his takeout box.“Peter Quill,” Loki repeated, “Lord of the Stars.” He let his head fall back against the seat to once again look out the window. “You could do worse,” he decided.
Relationships: Loki/Peter Quill
Comments: 6
Kudos: 48





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So a few things: first, probably best not to get too invested in the _plot_ plot that gets hinted at here and there, because I'm mostly just here for the banter and am also terrified of commitment. Second: I... don't actually have this finished, and so there isn't an update schedule like usual. Social distancing be like... Third: I've got this tagged with canon divergence because I want a world where Loki gets to like... live a life, but _technically_ nothing in here _precludes_ canon playing out how it does in the MCU, so. (The version in my head doesn't get in the way of my Peter/Gamorra feels, for example!)
> 
> Trigger warning for drowning that is only briefly relevant for part of the first chapter, and mild suicidal ideation.
> 
> As usual, beta'd by my lovely wife polkera!

The stars were beautiful, unfamiliar in the best way, laid into a sky the shade of a Yenai woman’s eyes and reflected in the ocean below. Peter sighed deeply and half smiled as he sipped from his bottle, narrowing his eyes as he started to build his own constellations.

“You ever been off planet?” he asked without looking away from the sky, pulling Brandy a little closer at the waist.

“No,” she replied, her own hand around his waist wandering down and playing with the top edge of his boxers. “Can we go inside yet?”

“I told you,” replied Peter without any hint of annoyance, “I’m Terran, not a god. You’ve gotta give it a rest.”

Brandy huffed out an impatient sigh, still playing with his waistband but not moving her hand any further down.

“I’ve been up there,” said Peter after a long, thoughtful pause and another sip.

“You own a ship,” muttered Brandy.

“Seen half the galaxy,” continued Peter, her words hardly registering against the stars in the sky.

Brandy hummed, her free hand touching his abs and staying there.

“It’s beautiful,” he said with another deep sigh.

“ _I’m_ beautiful,” said Brandy, pressing her breasts up against his side so that he could feel her nipples through her shirt.

“But you’re not…” he paused to think, gesturing vaguely at nothing with his bottle. “ _Existentially_ beautiful, you know?”

“Does existential want to ride your cock?” she mumbled against his shoulder, her frustration evident in the way she drummed her fingers against his abs.

Peter was fairly certain he wasn’t supposed to have heard what she’d said, so he chose to ignore it, sipping at his drink and humming one of his songs.

"Escape". Rupert Holmes. 1979.

“You know, on Terra,” he began, using his bottle to point up at a meteor hitting the atmosphere. “We call that a shooting star, and when you see one, you make a wish.”

“Wish you’d f...” Brandy paused as the meteorite continued to get larger - apparently it was large enough that it was actually going to land.

Peter frowned as he made the mental calculation of how close it was going to be when it hit the ocean; something was off about it, but he couldn’t place what.

“Is that a person?” asked Brandy, her grip on his waist tightening.

“Nooo,” said Peter, eyes narrowed as he tried to see what she was seeing. “No way.”

“I think that’s a person,” insisted Brandy, concern colouring her voice.

“Shit,” hissed Peter as the meteor-that-was-definitely-a-person hit the surface of the ocean and sprayed water into the sky. “Shit, that’s a person.”

He looked down the beach to his right and saw nobody. He looked down the beach to his left and saw nobody. His brain made the connection between seeing nobody and himself, and he took a deep breath before dropping the bottle into the sand and letting go of Brandy.

“You’re gonna go rescue them?” asked Brandy, her indignant words following him as he started to run on bare feet towards the water.

Peter spun around on his heels, tripping over himself twice before managing to continue walking backwards while he addressed Brandy.

“You know what?” he said, his smile tight as he pointed towards her. “I’m gonna need you to take that lovely pussy of yours somewhere else.”

“Fuck you,” she snarled as he turned back around and started to wade out into the water.

“Been there,” he called back without turning around, “done that.”

Whatever words she said were lost when he double tapped the control for his mask and dove forward. The shock of cold on his arms and chest and balls was more than enough to knock him back toward sobriety, hissing out a curse behind his mask before starting to swim towards where the person had hit the water.

When he reached where his instincts told him was right he cast around - the person was nowhere to be seen. For half a second Peter considered swimming back in towards the beach. The beach, where insatiable Brandy might still be waiting.

He dove down on the off chance that the person he was nominally rescuing hadn’t been dragged off by the currents. No need to experience guilt if he didn’t have to.

The water was cast in shades of ghostly red from his mask, the swim down a blur of floating specks and one particularly curious fish. When he reached the bottom he discovered that the colour of the ocean wasn’t just a reflection of the sky, but also from the faint purple glow of the silt. 

Peter spun slowly in a circle until he spotted a silhouette against the glow, pushing off against the silt towards it. 

The person was a pale-skinned man in a stupid horned helmet who was understandably unconscious and somehow only minorly singed from the fall. A tiny stream of bubbles escaped between his lips in what seemed to be one long exhale - most likely at least partly non-human.

Peter grabbed onto the front of the man’s coat and made an experimental attempt to lift him away from where he was floating a metre above the sand. It was too difficult for him to manage the trip back to the surface, and so Peter pulled the helmet off and discarded it to the side, the man’s eyes briefly flickering almost open in response to the rough treatment.

He was still too heavy, and Peter grimaced before pawing around at the man’s coat in an attempt to find the clasps. No luck. He didn’t hesitate before shoving his hands up the much shorter front - non-human or not, the man was likely running out of time.

His fingers brushed against something hard and Peter froze for a moment before cautiously investigating. A sheath - a dagger - he grinned behind the mask and worked the dagger out of the sheath before using it to unceremoniously slice the man’s coat up the front from waist to neck.

Then he let the dagger fall down into the sand, grabbing both sides of the coat and pulling them apart, the sound of the last few fibres tearing loud enough to reach Peter’s ears.

“Whoops,” he muttered to himself, his eyebrows going up as he witnessed the man’s shirt come undone along with the jacket to reveal the man’s skin.

Pale. Thin. Ripped.

Somehow, that wasn’t what Peter had expected.

He finished the rip and worked swiftly to pull the man’s arms out from his clothes, allowing himself to glance down the man’s lower body before deciding that he didn’t have the time to strip him down any more.

Another test of the man’s weight - ditching the coat and helmet cut it down by at least a third - and Peter pulled him close, knelt down, and then launched himself upward as hard as he could. 

The man gasped and coughed when they finally reached the surface, but didn’t wake, forcing Peter to drag him back to shore in a swim that felt infinitely longer than the trip out. 

When he reached the beach he dropped the man on his back, his feet still in the waves - with the tide going out, there was no reason to drag him any further. After he’d tapped the button behind his ear to hide the mask, he reached out to touch the man’s face, jerking his hand back when the man began to cough without any intervention, rolling half onto his side.

“Put me back,” he gasped between harsh breaths.

“What?” asked Peter, leaning forward over the man to keep his face in view. “Were you awake that _whole time?_ ”

The man took a moment to reply, one hand coming up to cover his face, shaking his head as he panted. “Some,” he muttered. “Regrettably.”

“Why didn’t you _help_ me?” snarled Peter, gesturing out at the water with one hand.

“I had hoped you would grow tired and let go,” he looked over his shoulder at Peter through his fingers. “If I’d known you were so…” his eyes travelled down Peter’s body. “Much,” he concluded, “I might have…”

His body sagged along with his words trailing off, and Peter was left staring at a man who was definitely-probably passed out on the beach.

It took several seconds for his thoughts to catch up to what had happened, and when it did, he bounced up onto his feet. After a pause to breathe through some of his frustration, he let himself kick sand at the man’s bare back exactly once before turning and striding up the beach towards where he’d parked the _Milano_.

Half way through the three minute walk he paused, took a breath, cursed, and then kept walking.

Taking the Milano back to pick the man up instead of trying to drag him across the sand was absolutely the best decision; lifting him into the ship with the tractor beam was significantly less work. As he watched the tractor beam raise the man into the hold Peter considered whether to let him lie on the hold’s floor out of spite, but after the beam unceremoniously dropped the man a metre onto the floor, Peter decided the bruises would be punishment enough.

Instead he knelt down and lifted the man with a grunt, carrying him to the drunk-bunk and awkwardly pushing him onto the thin mattress laid out on a nearly-humanoid length shelf. There was already a bucket on the floor next to the bunk, and after a quick once-over of the man Peter heaved a sigh and retrieved a blanket, tossing it over the man in the hope it would keep him from starting to shiver and _really_ looking pathetic.

Peter turned to head towards his own bunk and then paused, stepping back around and kneeling beside the bunk so that he could speak quietly near the man’s ear.

“You weren’t awake for all that too, were you?” he asked.

He received silence, the man’s brow slightly furrowed even in his sleep.

“Because if you were awake for all that,” continued Peter, “you’re a real asshole.”

More silence.

Peter drummed his fingers against the edge of the shelf-bunk, but successfully resisted the urge to prod the man’s shoulder _just in case_.

He managed a quick shower before collapsing into his own bunk - he’d gone to so much effort to keep sand out of the crack of his ass already and wasn’t about to get it in his bed - the time spent mulling over his swiftly expanding list of questions for the man. Turning off the lights made the questions come faster, but turning on his music softly next to his bed helped quiet them.

Two suns rose, Peter’s hangover significantly milder than it would have been if Brandy had stayed and his list of questions now _extensive_ , and the man hadn’t moved.

Three suns were in the sky, Peter’s early afternoon spent with a beer, nail clippers, and Redbone. The man rolled onto his back, the blanket twisted around in a way that made it obvious he hadn’t actually woken.

One sun set, and Peter’s list of questions was now titled “I’ve Got Places to Be, Asshole”. 

He didn’t wait for another sun to set before coming to the conclusion that if the man had wanted to be “put back” into the ocean to drown, he probably wasn’t going to care if Peter took them up into the sky.

Just after the first jump Peter was in the cockpit with leftover takeout in hand, feet on the copilot’s seat and headphones in place. He was humming and watching the stars, enjoying his last few hours of solitary peace before he met up with -

\- something moved in his peripheral vision and he jerked away, socked feet falling off the copilot’s chair as he struggled to prevent himself from spilling takeout all over his shirt.

“What the _hell?_ ” he snapped as he pulled his headphones away from his ears, watching the man sit in the chair across from him.

“You left my boots on,” said the man, his displeasure obvious despite the fact that his black hair was falling in his face and his shoulders were hunched under the blanket he held wrapped around him.

“Yeah,” agreed Peter without thought before he realized the problem and glanced down at the man’s bare feet.

“They feel disgusting,” said the man, voice just soft enough to keep the tone this side of accusatory.

“Well I don’t just go around stripping a man down without -” began Peter, his words stopping short when the man sat up straighter and opened the blanket to remind Peter of his bare chest.

“But removing my soaking leather boots was a step too far,” said the man, slumping back into the chair and dropping the blanket so that it wasn’t quite covering his entire front, a strip of skin visible all the way down to just below his navel.

“I ain’t gonna apologize for saving you from drowning,” said Peter, remembering the takeout in his hands only when he used his spoon to gesture fiercely in the man’s direction, a tiny piece of noodle flying off the end to hit the man’s chest.

They both went quiet, Peter staring at the man and the man staring at the wall behind him. 

Slowly the man looked down, fingers going to the half-noodle stuck to his chest and peeling it off as he first directed his eyes out the front window of the ship and then back to Peter.

“Why are we in space?” asked the man, timing his words for the same moment that he tried to flick the piece of noodle back into the takeout box in Peter’s hand.

“Shit,” hissed Peter - the timing and the man’s aim were just good enough that Peter didn’t manage to lift the box out of the way. He wrinkled his nose as he located the offending noodle in amongst the rest, looked back up at the man, and deliberately pulled out a spoonful of food that included it. 

“Just ‘cause you were auditioning to be Sleeping Beauty doesn’t mean I ain’t got a job,” he stated before shoving the food in his mouth and resolutely starting to chew. The extra salt really wasn’t _that_ bad.

The man’s eyebrows rose, the corners of his mouth twitching ever so slightly up.

 _Got him_ , whispered Peter’s thoughts. 

“So,” said the man, placing one elbow on the arm rest and sliding even further down in his chair so that his slouch started to look like a comfortable lounge, “to whom do I owe my thoroughly unwanted rescue?”

“Peter Quill,” he replied between bites. “You?”

“Loki,” said the man. “King of Asgard. God of Mischief.”

Peter paused with the spoon still in his mouth to study the man across from him - Loki expected him to think he was serious.

“Sometimes people call me Star-Lord,” added Peter. He was 98.7% sure that Loki was absolutely full of shit, but on the off chance that he _wasn’t_ , managing to get the buy-in of a god-king might make the name properly catch on. 

“Do they?” asked Loki with gentle disbelief.

“It’s a thing,” confirmed Peter as he gathered the last of the noodles into the corner of his takeout box.

“Peter Quill,” Loki repeated, “Lord of the Stars.” He let his head fall back against the seat to once again look out the window. “You could do worse,” he decided.

“It _is_ pretty cool,” agreed Peter, nodding along with a smile as he followed Loki’s gaze out the window.

“How many?” asked Loki after a pause.

“How many what?” asked Peter, blinking himself back to the present and setting the takeout box with the spoon on the dashboard in front of the window.

“How many stars are you the lord of?” clarified Loki - he was watching Peter with his chin resting on his knuckles.

Peter blinked. “I mean -” he’d never thought it through - “it’s, uh, more of a metaphor?”

“A metaphor for what?” asked Loki, interest in Peter adding some life to his expression.

“What’s being called the god of mischief a metaphor for?” countered Peter in a desperate attempt to buy time.

“Being the god of mischief,” replied Loki without a hint of hesitation.

“Mischief is a pretty lame thing to be the god of,” said Peter.

“Perhaps,” agreed Loki after a brief hum before his almost-smile graduated into real entertainment. “But I can promise you the other gods have less fun.”

“Prove it,” said Peter, grasping hold of his best bet at a distraction.

“I’ll be honest with you,” replied Loki, “I don’t usually show how much fun I am to men who go around stripping me down without -”

“Prove that you’re a god,” interrupted Peter, sitting a little straighter in his chair and crossing his arms.

“Nice try,” said Loki, reacting to Peter’s shift in posture by leaning forward, letting the blanket slide off his shoulders and placing elbows on his knees and chin on his laced fingers. “But right now we are talking about you, Star-Lord.”

Peter sighed deeply and looked around the cockpit. “This is exactly what I get for playing hero.”

“You left my feet wet,” said Loki, the entertainment gone and replaced with his former annoyance in a heartbeat.

“Would it kill you to give me a thank you?” asked Peter.

“Thank you,” said Loki, the words coming out almost before Peter was finished his question. There was a pause in which Loki looked to the ceiling, head cocked slightly to the side as though listening. “Sadly no,” he concluded, eyes back on Peter.

“What happened to you?” asked Peter, his curiosity rearing its head.

Loki’s expression went cold.

“What kind of king is pissed off he didn’t drown?” he pressed.

Loki studied him, the intensity of his gaze enough to hit Peter’s spine but not enough for him to cave and take the question back. Then Loki leaned even further forward, chin no longer on his hands.

“I want a shirt,” he stated with all the gravitas of declaring someone’s execution.


	2. Chapter 2

To Quill’s credit, he did manage to hold in his laughter, and so Loki placed another mental tally under the column “shallow, but not an idiot”. 

“Fair enough,” said Quill once his pause to collect his emotions was finished. “You’ll probably want a shower, too,” he added as he stood, leading the way down the ladder-steps.

“What?” asked Loki as he watched Quill descend.

“The next time I eat a noodle off your chest I don’t want it to taste like a salt lick,” he explained, flashing Loki a smirk before disappearing out of the ladder’s well.

Loki pursed his lips; the number of reasons that Quill had to take him seriously were precisely nil, and he wasn’t certain as to whether that was a problem to correct or let lie. On the one hand, he’d already introduced himself as the king of Asgard. On the other hand, he’d been enjoying the mental sparring right up until Quill had brought that introduction back up.

He decided that he was too tired to make a decision, and abandoned the blanket as unworthy of his attention before following Quill down the ladder.

Quill talked as he led him through the ship as though he thought Loki hadn’t investigated every room, shelf, and closet before he’d let Quill know that he was awake. It was easy enough to tune out; it wasn’t as though Loki had any small experience being told things he already knew by people whose primary hobbies included talking about themselves.

Resentment began to simmer in the pit of his stomach as he thought of Thor; of how he didn’t so much have to _convince_ Thor that an idea was his so much as _let_ him think an idea was his. Of listening ad nauseum to the boasting of warriors, of his own victories dismissed as simple _mischief_ because of the involvement of magic, of -

\- the shirt hit him full in the face, forcing him to strangle down an undignified yelp and fumbling for altogether too long to catch it before it hit the floor.

“Yeah,” said Quill with a half smile when Loki looked up. “That’s what I thought.”

Instead of explaining himself Loki held up the shirt; he and Quill were roughly of a height, but it was going to be a touch wide in the shoulders. It was long sleeved and grey, the sleeves appreciated but the colour ugly - he glanced between the shirt and Quill, and came to the conclusion that the colour would look significantly better on the other man.

“Does it meet your standards, your highness?” asked Quill when Loki gave him slightly too much silence.

“‘Your Majesty’,” Loki corrected without thinking.

“Aw,” said Quill with a grin, “thanks, but -”

“The honorific for a king is ‘Your Majesty’,” clarified Loki, deciding as Quill spoke that he was going to commit to the arrogance out of sheer curiosity.

“Uh huh,” replied Quill, his eyebrows raising and his smile never quite leaving his face. Then he pointed over his shoulder with his thumb. “Shower’s that way, dipshit.”

Loki slung the shirt over one shoulder, stepping past Quill with his head held high in mock dignity. “It will do.”

Quill snorted, but Loki didn’t turn to see if the sound was accompanied by a smile, already focused on his moment alone.

The washroom on Quill’s ship was significantly larger than any of the closets, and significantly smaller than any of the closets Loki was used to on Asgard. He hadn’t spent much time in the washroom when he’d explored the rest of the ship - he’d wanted to avoid the mirror.

Now, with a lock between himself and Quill and a moment of guaranteed privacy, he let himself lean against the sink’s edge to take in what he was. The pale skin that was as unnatural as any glamour, the green eyes that should have been red, the -

“Hey Mischief,” came Quill’s voice from the other side of the door.

Loki shut his eyes and hung his head, his fingers tightening on the sink.

“Want some sweats?” asked Quill without bothering to check if Loki was listening.

“Why would I want a fever?” asked Loki, distracted by the frustration in his chest.

“What…” Quill’s muttering was stifled by the door, and since Quill couldn’t see it Loki cringed; he’d missed what was likely an obvious colloquialism. “I meant pants.”

“Then why not just say pants?” asked Loki, addressing the door like it was Quill and he was an idiot.

“Sweatpants,” said Quill. “The name’s kind of a Terran thing?”

Loki blinked. They were speaking _english_. He slid open the door and took the pants out of Quill’s hands, letting them fall open. 

“Ah, _treningsbukse_ ," he muttered, letting himself feel relieved that he had an excuse for missing the word. The last time he’d been on Midgard he’d spent most of his time in Norway. “As ugly as ever,” he added at the end, thumbing the fabric.

“Well if you don’t want ‘em,” said Quill with annoyance as he reached out to grab the pants out of Loki’s hands, “give ‘em back.”

Before Quill could finish the movement Loki whirled and stepped back into the washroom to put the door between them. 

“You’re welcome,” called Quill through the door.

Loki stared at the sweatpants; in principle he considered himself the owner of anything he held in his hands, but in practice, he _didn’t_ want them. He’d fully intended to simply magic his own pants clean.

He sighed, dropped the pants to the floor, and stepped back up to the mirror. Instead of looking into it he placed his fingers against the glass and let his forehead rest between them, eyes shut as he used his thoughts to tug at the magic that held his appearance away from his heritage.

It felt so natural, so entangled with the magic that already existed within him as a living being; it was a work of art that only his mother - Frigga, she _wasn’t_ his mother - could have accomplished. It was no simple glamour, and therefore no surprise that only the Casket of Ancient Winters had been able to shake it, so strong that he was concerned that if he watched the change he might just shapeshift into the _idea_ of what he _thought_ he was meant to look like instead of -

“Hey,” came Quill’s voice from the other side of the door.

It was so jarring that Loki accidentally let go of his disentanglement all at once, the magic snapping back into place so hard it knocked the cold breath out of his chest.

“I forgot to tell you the rules about what’s in the shower,” said Quill.

“Rules,” repeated Loki, his frustration with Quill’s interruption only outmatched by his unreasonable fury at being told that the bathing he was entitled to was about to be placed under constraints.

“Yeah,” said Quill - apparently he was immune to Loki’s tone. “Y’see the chrome bottles on the shelf in the shower?”

Despite himself Loki turned his head with his forehead still against the mirror to look into the shower. The bottles were there, gaudy and covered in a red and black unreadable font. He hummed a vague acknowledgement.

“Don’t use those,” commanded Quill. “You want the plastic bottles on the top shelf.”

The plastic bottles were small, cheap, and lavender.

“Those are for the women you sleep with?” asked Loki, voice dry as his fury immediately devolved into exhaustion. Mortals were _so_ predictable.

“I didn’t pay for the good shit just so it could all get wasted on some Shuin girl’s mane,” explained Quill.

“You speak from experience,” said Loki, stepping back to look at the door and half-smile at the obvious lingering irritation.

“Her hair was gorgeous,” replied Quill shortly - before Loki could press for more, he heard Quill’s feet treading away across the metal floor.

Loki stared at the door as he thought. He was annoyed, didn’t have a ‘mane’, and had all kinds of experience putting objects back _exactly_ where he found them.

He let his head fall back, eyes on the ceiling. He’d passed out shortly after Odin and Thor had let him fall. In his mind, attempting to destroy Jotunheim was mere hours ago. Now he was standing in a mortal’s washroom mentally sorting out the best way to swap which soap was in which bottle.

From attempting the impossible feat of winning Odin’s favour by killing his real father and destroying all of Jotunheim to standing on someone else’s nightclothes in exile. The idea that some of the Jotunns might have lives as mundane as this skittered across his mind, that he’d attempted to kill a group of people he knew as warriors but that in all actuality quite possibly wore sweatpants had him feeling -

“You could just kill him,” he murmured to himself as he heard Quill’s socked feet approach the door. “You inspected the controls while he wasn’t looking. You recognized enough of it to sort it out enough to fly.” He paused. “Alone. In the void of space. To nowhere.”

Quill knocked on the door as he spoke. “I just realized maybe you want a clean towel,” he said without waiting for Loki’s response.

“Perhaps, yes,” Loki acknowledged.

“They’re in the bottom drawer on the left,” said Quill.

“Noted,” stated Loki.

He listened to Quill take several steps away down the hall, not bothering to do anything but listen for Quill’s next interruption.

“Oh, and there’s razors in the drawer on the right,” Quill called from probably halfway down the hall.

Loki hooked one set of fingers on the inside edge of the sink, leaning back so that the weight of his body hung on one arm. He was now convinced that Quill was doing it on purpose, and so he waited.

“But don’t shave anything weird,” called Quill from even further down the hall.

Quill had given him an opening in the mental spar, and Loki seized onto it as hard as he could by letting out a peal of laughter that was held just far enough back in his throat to be ominous. The details of whatever Quill said in response were lost to the distance and the muffling of the door, but it sounded distinctly like a curse.

Then Loki eyed the shower; if he wanted Quill to stop harassing him, he was going to have to get into it sooner rather than later. In an ideal world he’d have preferred a bath - magicking away the thin layer of filth would be unsatisfying and involved, but he’d also never particularly understood the appeal of standing in piss-warm artificial rain.

He heard Quill’s feet in the hall and shucked off his pants before stepping into the shower, twisting the dial just far enough to turn the water on but not far enough to add any heat. He hardly shivered when the water hit his chest, and as he listened to Quill’s footsteps it occurred to him that quite possibly his near immunity to cold that left others freezing might be related to his Jotunn heritage.

For half a moment anger at his father - at Odin - rose… and then was replaced by exasperation at Quill for _walking past the washroom door instead of saying anything_.

“Bastard,” Loki muttered with a smile. He _liked_ this game.

If nothing else, it was going to make hearing Quill’s response to discovering that the trappings of his shower had been tampered with delicious.

He listened with half an ear for Quill’s next interruption, twirling his fingers to draw the contents of the first bottle out and into the air on a flicker of green. It was physically finicky work, the kind he’d learned he was young in order to hone the necessary focus he would need for more complex workings. Of late he’d rarely had the opportunity to use it; both his duties and his misbehaviour required more than petty cantrips.

“What is it, Quill?” Loki called when he heard Quill stop outside the door. There was no reason to let Quill think that Loki wasn’t on to him.

“I figured you’d want to know that the shower runs out of hot water after eight minutes,” said Quill - if Loki had thrown him off by being prepared, the other man hid it well.

“Oh?” asked Loki, voice raised over the sound of the shower, eyes on the four bubbles of shampoo and conditioner floating in the air above him and cold water running down his back.

“Which means you’ve got about…” Quill hummed, “two minutes left.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” said Loki as he held up the lavender shampoo bottle to the bottom of the bubble of expensive conditioner and watched the bubble drain into the bottle.

“See you in two,” replied Quill, his voice kept breezy - Loki was certain he heard a note that implied he was unsure.

Loki didn’t respond, focusing on the task of refilling the bottles. He didn’t rush himself in any way once he was finished, leaving the water just as cold as before while he placed the chrome bottles back into position. He stared at them, a hand against his chin. He nudged one slightly to the left. Used magic to move the other back by one quarter of a centimetre. Stared, nodded slowly, and reached for the purple bottles to begin washing himself.

Five minutes later he turned off the water, hand still on the dial as he thought. 

Part of him wanted to find a way to raise hel on Asgard, to take back his place as king. Part of him still wanted to die, could list options off hand. The only honest part of him, the part of him that sounded altogether too much like his mother, made him sigh. What he really wanted was to know what was going to happen next if he just _watched_.

Watch the Nine Realms fall apart under Thor’s definition of ‘diplomacy’. Watch Odin regret his decision as to whom he’d picked as the golden child. Watch the galaxy he was in spin in whatever direction it liked without input from him. 

… Watch Quill’s ass.

It wasn’t as though he had anywhere to go or anything to do. Perhaps it was time to take the easy option until forced to do otherwise.

With the decision made Loki stretched his shoulders, adjusted the positioning of the chrome bottles one last time, and then shook the water off his hands. Habit dictated that the gesture be accompanied by a twisting flick of his fingers to dry himself, familiar green light sparking across his skin.

He stepped out of the shower and glanced into the mirror, whatever thoughts he had about his correct-wrong appearance distracted by the towel rack in his sightline. If he was going to spend his time watching Quill until he was told to leave, he might as well keep playing their game. Quill wanted proof of godhood, and he would keep feeding him the implication of magic without demonstrating it in front of him until it was inconvenient to do so.

Loki didn’t pull out a dry towel, instead choosing to leave the implications up to Quill’s imagination. Then he ran water through his hair and left it unstyled, putting on the sweatpants and shirt second in order to leave tell-tale hints of water from his hair on his shoulders. He frowned into the mirror, plucking at the seams of the slightly too large shoulders before giving in to the temptation of vanity and shrinking the shirt ever so slightly to improve the fit.

It wasn’t like a tighter shirt was going to hurt Quill any when he gave it back.

Then he stepped out into the hall, stretching his arms for effect as he went on the off-chance Quill might be there to see it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ... so if that one single word of not-english is wrong, _somebody tell me_ , I'd rather know and fix it than not know and be embarrassed on spec forever. :'D


	3. Chapter 3

“Your great aunt twice removed on your mother’s side was a gun runner,” said Peter, staring at the screen with his eyebrows raised. He noted and then ignored the sound of Loki moving around on the deck below; that was a _potential_ problem, not a currently-in-front-of-him problem.

“ _Yes_ ,” confirmed Shaylin with a firm nod.

“Who died of an overdose at her best friend’s fifth wedding,” continued Peter.

“ _Mhm_ ,” replied Shaylin with another nod.

“And you want me to finish her last job,” finished Peter.

“ _Just point A to point B_ ,” confirmed Shaylin, her words altogether too confident.

Peter sighed out a deep breath. “I’m gonna choose to believe you for the next five minutes. Why’d you call me up from three sectors away?”

“ _I mean…_ ” Shaylin looked away, up, shrugged slow. “ _I heard you had another falling out with… and so you’d probably want the work… doing you a favour, really…_ ”

“Yeah,” said Peter, the faint sound of synth keys from the sound system not quite properly registering. “Last time ‘Point A to Point B’ turned out to be ‘Points A through G’, so...”

He trailed off as the sound of the keyboard rose in volume, the synths rolling and Shaylin’s expression turning confused as she started to hear it on her end.

_I work all night, I work all day, to pay the bills I have to -_

“Mother _fucker_ ,” snarled Peter, abruptly standing and giving Shaylin a fabulous view of his belt.

“ _Have to go?_ ” asked Shaylin, relief filling her almost drowned out voice.

“Be on time,” Peter snapped before shoving the screen away.

“ _Oh, that’s ri -_ ” started Shaylin, the last word cut off when he smacked the button to cut the connection.

Peter didn’t take the ladder-stairs properly, grabbing onto the railing and sliding down all at once. Turning the corner rewarded him with the sight of Loki sitting cross legged on his bunk, mouthing along to the words of the song - _in my dreams I have a plan_ \- staring down at the magazine in his lap. Peter’s blankets were all dumped on the floor so that his collection of cassette tapes could be spread across the mattress, the secret compartment the magazine had been stashed in hanging open.

“What are you _doing?_ ” snarled Peter, forced to shout over the music.

Loki looked at him without any concern for his anger, holding up the magazine and letting one of the full colour fold-out spreads fall open on full display without breaking eye contact. It was a krylorian girl without a top, hair covering one of her breasts but not the other, a finger pulling down the top edge of her black underwear.

“Very nice,” said Loki - the words were clear enough given the smile, even if Peter couldn’t hear it.

For a single second Peter wasn’t sure what to do - _money, money, money_ \- he stepped into Loki’s space and leaned forward over him, forcing him to sink a little lower onto the bed as he first lowered the volume and then turned the music off.

“If you ever touch my shit again,” said Peter, his voice low as he stayed leaning over Loki, “I’ll -” _throw you out the airlock_ he thought to himself as he gently removed the magazine from Loki’s hands - “take my shirt back.”

Loki held his eyes and slowly raised one hand to press the music back on. Peter did nothing to stop him, and after a pause - _must be funny_ \- Loki smirked and whispered the word “liar.”

“You’re just trying to mess with me,” Peter decided as he stood up and began to fold the pages of the magazine back together without looking.

“Why would I do that?” asked Loki, his focus on the disappearing woman in the magazine.

“I dunno,” countered Peter, tossing the magazine onto the bed across from his own. He was an _adult fucking man_ , and he wasn’t going to be embarrassed by his perfectly legal and, frankly, _softcore_ porn. “Why would you?”

Loki sighed deeply. “Why does anyone do anything, really?”

“Y’ain’t seriously gonna start in on the suicide crap again, are you?” asked Peter. With the magazine out of the way he started to collect the cassettes laid out on his bunk - at least Loki had them spread in the correct order so that he wouldn’t have to reorganize.

“Undecided,” said Loki. 

Peter watched Loki watch him put the cassettes away - the word had been said with altogether too much firmness for someone who was still suicidal, and Loki’s interest was focused. He just wanted to know what Peter would say.

“We’re on approach to Hwin Beta,” he replied as he stepped away, grabbing the edge of the doorway to swing himself around the corner. “Do me a favour and wait until you’re off my ship.”

“Ooooh,” said Loki to his back, all curiosity and no angst. “And here I thought you were a hero.”

“Only when it’s convenient,” Peter called back from the stair-ladder.

Loki’s laughter from behind him was all the confirmation he needed that his guess was right.

“You’re not even going to keep an eye on me,” said Loki, his mildly offended voice drifting after Peter from the bunk.

“You’ll follow on your own,” called Peter without thinking. 

“Oh?” asked Loki, annoyance touching the single word.

Peter turned and grinned down the ladder shaft at Loki, who had already followed him that far. “I am the most interesting damn thing on this ship.”

He didn’t wait to see if he was right, ignoring Loki’s noncommittal hum in favour of getting himself settled into the pilot’s seat. They were getting close enough to Hwin Beta that he couldn’t just leave the _Milano_ on auto-pilot, regardless of whether Loki followed.

Which he didn’t, the music softly playing over the sound system, discomfort rising in Peter’s stomach. He’d miscalculated - telling someone what they were or weren’t going to do was an asshole move, and Loki seemed…

… _it’s only natural, but why did it have to be_ …

“ABBA?” Peter shouted in the general direction of the steps. “Really?”

It worked, Loki’s head popping up into the cockpit several seconds later. “I needed to know if I could trust you,” he said as though the non sequitur explained shit all.

“What?” asked Peter after a snort.

“Can you really trust a man who doesn’t own an ABBA album?” asked Loki as he properly entered the cockpit and collapsed into the copilot’s seat. “And I must say, the length of time with which it took you to identify them does not bode well.”

“No, I knew it was ABBA,” said Peter, the view of the white clouds against the deep green planet below soothing his ruffled feathers. “I just didn’t realize god-kings had a taste for the 70s.”

“I went for the moon landing,” explained Loki, a smile on his face when Peter glanced over, his eyes focused out the window on the same view of the planet. “Stayed for the sex.” He paused, a small laugh escaping from his lips. “Stayed longer for the LSD.”

“Alright,” said Peter as the _Milano_ sank down into the clouds - he wasn’t sure what kind of game Loki was playing, but he was _talking_ , and talking was Peter’s best bet at getting real answers as to who the fuck Loki was. “I’ll bite. What was the moon landing like?”

“It’s not every day you see a species take its first steps beyond its borders,” said Loki. “It was… quaint.”

“Was the sex quaint too?” asked Peter, mild annoyance surfacing on behalf of his home planet. “Or did the moon landing make it better?”

“Sex is rarely quaint,” Loki informed him - he could hear the smile in his voice.

“Rarely?” asked Peter, his eyebrows going up. He’d had some bad fucking sex, but ‘quaint’ wasn’t on the list.

“When you have surprisingly vigorous sex with a shepherdess in a field of flowers,” began Loki. Peter snorted, but the sound didn’t stop Loki in the slightest. “Or fuck a fellow warrior by firelight on the eve before battle -” this time Peter actually laughed - “or gentle copulation in the royal bed on your wedding night under the watchful eye of your attendants.”

The last one had Peter barking out a peal of laughter hard enough that his hand shifted on the controls, and the ship wobbled. He glanced at Loki to check if the wobble had caught him off guard, but he was lounging exactly the way he had been before, watching Peter carefully with satisfaction written across his face.

“I didn’t take you for a married man,” said Peter, seizing an opportunity to probe for information instead of telling Loki he was full of shit.

“I’ve never been a married man,” replied Loki.

“Got divorced that fast, huh?” suggested Peter as he turned the _Milano_ towards the docking port. The weather was dreary now that they were under the clouds; a day that had looked bright now looked like it might rain. “Perks of being a king I guess.”

“Would that a queen were so lucky,” Loki muttered.

All Peter managed was a confused glance to catch Loki sulking before the docking authority hailed. He went through today’s pre-prepared spiel - yes it was a Ravager ship, no he wasn’t a Ravager, something something sob story about an escape and could they please waive the landing fee? - docking the _Milano_ with minimum fuss and a discount.

Then he called Shaylin to let her know that he’d landed… and got her away message. He tried her girlfriend, and got an earful about how they weren’t together anymore _and how dare he even_ before he cut the line mid sentence. He tried Shay again, and this time he left her a message - she had a six hour window to show up on account of them being friends, which they weren’t going to be (yes they were) if she didn’t show up at all.

Loki was so quiet throughout the entire thing that for a brief moment Peter almost forgot he was there, and once he was finished, waited with his eyes still on the dashboard control for Loki’s commentary. 

It didn’t come, silence sitting between them until Peter properly turned to look at Loki. The other man had taken to staring out the front window at nothing in particular, one set of fingers holding his black hair pushed back from his face.

Peter fast forwarded the cassette before pressing play on the dash, and the guitar of “Folsom Prison Blues” began to thrum softly through the ship, the unfortunate fact that he’d taped over the second half of the ABBA album when he was seventeen revealed.

The change had Loki blinking back to reality, his eyes coming back to Peter and shifting swiftly from confused to offended.

“Sorry,” said Peter, shrugging and grinning at Loki’s annoyance. “I ain’t trustworthy.”

“I gathered when you failed to introduce yourself to them as Peter Quill, Lord of the Stars,” replied Loki, gesturing out the window at the dock. “What was that a metaphor for again?” he asked, the note of spite and lack of smile unsettling.

Peter sighed out annoyance of his own, eyes flickering briefly to the ceiling. “It ain’t a metaphor for anything,” he admitted. He sighed again at Loki’s questioning look. “Nobody’s ever gone in on the logistics before, so I panicked.” 

“Assuming meaningless titles begs trouble,” said Loki - the words might have been condescending, but the weary tone with which Loki said them implied a personal experience, and Peter grinned.

“It’s still a cool name,” he insisted in an attempt to break Loki’s mood.

“Adorable,” Loki drawled, the smile that touched his lips evidence that the attempt had succeeded. “Now,” he began, pushing himself up from the copilot’s chair and stepping to the ladder down before Peter could take a jab at the ‘mischief’ title. “Surely the Lord of the Stars has a fridge.”

“Adorable?” Peter asked the empty air of the cockpit after several seconds of sitting with Johnny Cash turning over in his ears. He looked to the speaker embedded along the side of the dashboard. “Are we flirting?” he asked Johnny at a whisper.

The answer was _always be a good boy, don’t ever play with guns_ , and Peter slowly, thoughtfully nodded his head.

“Thanks,” he said, patting the dashboard twice. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

Then he stood, following Loki down the ladder without another hesitation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If I ever update the previous chapters of this fic with something, it'll be the first chapter, with more explicit lyric choices like this one. I had a lot of fun, and know a lot more music from before I was born than I realized.
> 
> Pray for me that I finish the next chapter to upload on Thurs/Fri next week. Even extremely mild benzo withdrawal isn't fun, kids.


End file.
